The Association of Small Bombs

A brilliant examination of aftermath, how life is built of consequences, both imagined and unimagined, the tight web of human life and human sympathy. Karen Mahajan knows everyone, on every side of a detonation: the lost, the grieving, the innocent, the guilty, the damaged. It’s hilarious and also devastating. Karan Mahajan is a virtuoso writer, and this is a wonderful book.

Elizabeth McCracken

Karan Mahajan’s thoughtful, touching and perfectly pitched account of two marketplace bombings and the casual havoc they cause in a handful of Delhi families is almost subversive in its even-handedness and its charity. For all its unflinching - and unnerving - fatalism, The Association of Small Bombs is an unusually wise, tender, and generous novel.

Jim Crace

In this fine novel, Karan Mahajan has achieved a brilliant and distinctive success. The sources, and unbearable, unending, consequences of a terrorist atrocity constitute a subject extremely difficult to capture in a work of serious literature. But with his intelligence, humanity, and art, Mahajan has given us a deep portrait of life in a kind of darkness.

Norman Rush

Like a Russian novel set in India, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs has the sweep, wisdom and sensibility of the old masters. Here the humor of Bulgakov and the heart of Pasternak deliver an exploded-view of a small bomb that goes off in a minor market in a corner of South Delhi. Like shrapnel, themes of suffering, dislocation and redemption radiate from the blast, and none will be spared Mahajan’s piercing gaze. Urgent and masterful, this novel shows us how bystander, bomber, victim, and survivor will forever share a patch of scorched ground.

Adam Johnson

An utterly brilliant book. Rarely does one encounter a work as masterful in the precision of its writing or as penetrating in the insights it provides. Karan Mahajan is a writer to be admired.

Kevin Powers

Karan Mahajan is daring comfortable readers to make an uncomfortable connection: between the bomb that goes off on the first page of his book, and the way the pages that follow seem to scatter, in bright-hot shards of heartbreaking story. The Association of Small Bombs ... is a work of disabused intelligence, and staggering compassion. ... Mahajan’s sense of fiction as the history behind history puts him in league with Joseph Conrad, and like Conrad he succeeds brilliantly at writing past Empire, by relating the newest of news-cycles to the oldest of tale-cycles.

Joshua Cohen

In Mahajan's riveting, intricate story, the aftershocks of small bombs are as inescapable as their explosions

Alex Traub, Vice Magazine

Beautifully written... profoundly sad

Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

A powerful novel about one of the defining issues of our age.

Bookseller

Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and clarity of vision… He is particularly adept at capturing the quicksilver shifts of mood that accompany states of high emotion

London Review of Books

Wonderful... smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives – about grief, death, violence, politics – I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste... thrilling, tender and tragic... generous without prejudice, which feels at once subversive and refreshing

Fiona Maazel, The New York Times Book Review

Brilliant, troubling...superbly suspenseful... Mr. Mahajan’s writing is acrid and bracing, tightly packed with dissonant imagery... The sharpest passages examine the terrorist mind-set and the demented rationales for mass murder with such acid-etched clarity that it’s possible to feel the deadly magnetism of the arguments... The finest [novel] I’ve read at capturing the seduction and force of the murderous, annihilating illogic that increasingly consumes the globe

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity... he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes... Mahajan hasn’t lost his sharp comic impulses... [Mahajan's] facility for gorgeous turns of phrase produces many passages of vivid, startling power

Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

At its best, Mahajan’s prose sings with novelty, sensuousness and empathy, keenly alive to many kinds of pleasure.

Nakul Krishna, Literary Review

[A] thoughtful second novel

Hari Kunzru, Guardian

Engrossing... looks at the after-effects of tragedy from the perspective of the victims, survivors and perpetrators

Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times

This is a superb novel… In mimicking the bomb’s structure, Mahajan creates its opposite: a careful, discriminate and moral work of art

Luke Brown, Financial Times

A steadily intelligent novel.

Thump, Book of the Year

A novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. A novel about India that is a novel about the world... A heartbreakingly true and daring novel...that can truly help us understand ourselves, and others, in the dangerous world in which we live

Alexander Chee

Ask[s] us to consider...lives which rarely find themselves mentioned on the pages of newspapers, let alone in novels

Alex Preston, Best Fiction of 2016, Observer

Karan Mahajan's masterful novel explores the aftermath of a small bomb detonation in the '90s in Delhi, and the many people whose lives it alters – from the families of victims to the bombers themselves. With great empathy and no lack of humour, Mahajan shows the multitudinous sides to the kind of story that we usually read a line or two about in a newspaper, or hear short mention of on television

Esquire

The Association of Small Bombs deftly shifts the reader’s sympathy back and forth between the two men who pull off a relatively insignificant small blast, and the people, sometimes dislikeable, who suffer the consequences. But the moral power of his novel comes from his determination to take individual losses – and choices – seriously, rather than assigning a scale whereby the degree of tragedy is calibrated by high or low body-counts

Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times

Karan Mahajan is a writer with great command and acute and original insights. He offers what few can: a stereoscopic view of reality in dark, contemporary times

Rachel Kushner

Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels

BBC Radio 4

The Association of Small Bombs is...packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist

Dinaw Mengestu

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout

New York Times

A superb novel… Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India

Financial Times

A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity

New Yorker